


Composing Our Collapse

by penitence_road



Category: Yoroiden Samurai Troopers | Ronin Warriors
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, M/M, Pre-Canon, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 04:05:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17114129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penitence_road/pseuds/penitence_road
Summary: Character by character, line by line, the four youths who will become the warlords write their relationship together before writing it apart.





	Composing Our Collapse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> This fic uses the warlords' mortal names, as taken from theria.net's archived information. Though I hope their personalities make it apparent enough which is which, for the purposes of clarity, they appear in the order they're tagged: Anubis, Dais, Cale, Sekhmet.

When Toshitada first learns about soulmates, he is all of five years old.  He has just been shuffled out of the way of his nursemaid, who, as writing began to unfurl itself down the side of her neck one evening, decided she very urgently needed some time to herself.  He creeps out of bed once she’s left and presses his ear to the door, and from amidst the breathless gossip, what he remembers is this:

“I hear the soldiers write messages to their soulmates on the eve of a battle.  Just to say a last goodbye, in case they never meet.” 

Toshitada has not, previously, been very interested in his education, but the thought that he might die before he meets the person he is destined for distresses him like nothing else he has ever encountered.  And thus, even before he learns to write properly, he begins to put one shoulder to his tutor and, when the man isn’t looking, trace his fingers in uneven motions across the pale, soft skin on the inside of his arm, anticipating the day he can use a brush to make the words real.  

/ _Hello.  I am yours._ /

 

* * *

 

Jirougorou is eleven when he discovers his greatest secret.  He is tucked beneath a willow tree with his calligraphy supplies, trading kanji with his soulmate on his left arm—/ _open_ / and / _close_ /, / _spring_ / and / _summer_ /.A sudden tickle on his bare ankle makes him nearly kick his inkstone across the courtyard as another set of syllabaries begins to paint themselves up the inside of his right calf. 

/ _Don’t you get bored?_ / is what they say, but it isn’t what they say that matters.  What matters is this:

The writing is slower and more cautious, the shape of the hiragana simpler and rounder, and Jirougorou’s hand trembles slightly as he tucks his leg in closer and writes, beneath the new script, / _Don’t you like them?_ /

/ _NO_ /, the other person writes, a few strong, dark strokes as, immediately to the side, the word / _Stop_ / scribes itself out in his soulmate’s hand.  / _You stop_ / appears below that, and what Jirougorou realizes, in a moment of delirious pride as he watches an argument paint itself across his skin, is this:

He has more than one soulmate.

 

* * *

 

By the time he’s fifteen, Kujuurou has begun to form pictures of his soulmates—all three of them. 

Toshitada is enthusiastic and competitive, and this extends to writing like he’ll win some sort of contest if he writes the most before they finally find one another and, with the touch of their hands, make their final marks, the ones that will seal away all the rest.  He is most likely to write in the early morning, just after meal times, or at night.  He writes mostly on his left arm, and his hand is quick and cramped, the better to fit in more writing.  He is, judging by the progression of his handwriting over the years and what he relates of his training, easily the youngest of them.

Jirougorou is a poet, or fancies himself as such, and a provocateur.  He talks little of himself but has a maddeningly keen ability to add strokes to the others’ kanji to change their meaning; it’s usually just to tease.  Sometimes, though, he seems to take moody turns, leaving snippets of verse and image, even the odd doodle—though he’s less adept with images than he is words.  He writes in strange places and at odd times—almost never in the morning, Kujuurou has noticed, and wonders if Jirougorou is busy then, or just lazy.  He was the one Kujuurou knew first, the one he traded kanji with as a boy in the long, late summer afternoons or the longer, darker evenings of winter.

Naotoki writes by far the least of any of them, and when he does, he is often argumentative or snide.  He was less so when he was younger; he used to write impeccable sutras when anyone in the group was struggling with a grief or hardship—a temple child, Kujuurou supposes, and as for Naotoki’s growing distance, well, it’s well-known that the priests disapprove of cultivating soulmate bonds.  He does still write, though; for all his sourness, not since that first argument about kanji has he suggested that they stop.  His hand is quick and sharp and he still, even now, writes mostly on his leg, perhaps for the better support for his papercut-thin script.  Twice Kujuurou has woken in the night to find confessions—/ _I’m a monster’s son_ / _;_ / _today I killed my father in my mind_ /—scribed black and fine across his skin, hairline cracks in porcelain, and washed away before he can grind the ink to write a reply.  There were probably others; perhaps Jirougorou sees more.

Kujuurou strives to be mindful of the image he presents to them.  He doesn’t rise to Jirougorou’s baiting; he promises Toshitada that the two of them will have a proper sparring match when they someday meet.  On Naotoki’s bad days, he painstakingly copies back the old sutras around the bone of his ankle or down the inside of his wrist.  He writes to them with strict regularity—after his lessons and after dinner.  He wears long sleeves even in the summer to hide Toshitada’s rambling, signs Jirougorou’s verses with the names of the original poets when he recognizes them, and spends far longer than he really should trying to figure out where Naotoki lives, for if any of them need to be rescued from their circumstances, it’s certainly him. 

The war is making things difficult, though, and Kujuurou lives with the fear that when he finally meets one of his soulmates, it will be on the opposite side of a battlefield.

 

* * *

 

When Naotoki is fourteen, the temple he was raised in burns. 

War has swept Japan fully, catching everything alight in its wake. 

Toshitada has been writing less lately, after Jirougorou told him that he was going to wind up giving something important away.  Jirougorou himself has fallen back on his old doodles, constellations, the silhouettes of mountains, the grave, graceful lines of red maple leaves or trailing willow branches.   Kujuurou is more austere than ever, short and restrained in his responses, and initiating practically nothing. 

These are the things Naotoki thinks on as he digs his way out of a collapsed ruin of wood and lacquer, the taste of smoke an acrid burn at the back of his throat. 

When he shoves the last beam away and crawls out into a sunset the color of high autumn, he senses the new messages on his skin without having to look for them.  When he looks anyway, he finds them half-obscured beneath smears of black ash and blood. 

_Did those transfer?  Is that how it works?_ he wonders, staring down numbly at Toshitada’s urgent / _What happened?_ / and Jirougorou’s / _It looks like charcoal_ / and Kujuurou’s / _Father says the fighting’s getting very bad in Kyushu_./

They’ve all written out his name, every one of them. 

/ _Naotoki, Naotoki, Naotoki._ /

Every time, they pull him back from the precipice of sacred emptiness. 

He hears hissing.  Embers of the fire, maybe, or something in the woods, the monster he was always told waited there, the old dark destiny his caretakers spent most of his life trying to peel away from him.  But his caretakers are dead now, and he beyond caring, and so he struggles to his feet and begins dragging himself towards the treeline. 

Before he’s quite cleared the monastery grounds, he disturbs something with his foot—a tipped-over pot of dye, most of its contents staining the debris beneath it a brilliant deep blue, dark as dusk.  He stares at it for a long moment. 

Someday, he will find those three and lay his hand on them—the inside of an arm, a sloping shoulder, the hollow of an ankle—and his touch will stain their skin, darker and more permanent than any ink or dye, and he won’t have to suffer their clinging care any longer. 

He crouches down and reaches for the pot.

 

* * *

 

Miles to the north in Kyoto, Toshitada recoils in horror as indigo—blue-near-black, far darker than the smudging, feathery gray that had suffused over his arms and face just as dinner was winding down—spills into his hands out of nothing and knifes up his arms in violent, forceful streaks, painting over his and all the others’ words.

 

* * *

 

After they lose Naotoki, Toshitada is inconsolable.  Every night, the same name scribes itself onto Jirougorou’s skin in Toshitada’s hand, the kanji small and—well, Jirougorou’s reading of it tends to depend on his mood.  Is this ritual of their youngest member’s hope?  Pleading?  A sort of memorial for the dead?  Neither he nor Kujuurou has the heart to put a stop to it. 

No, that task falls to Naotoki himself.

It happens in the closing hours of an autumn evening, nearly four months after the ink-bath-by-proxy that was their last word from Naotoki; Jirougorou is sitting on the roof with a damp cloth and a brush, dodging the ill tempers inside after the latest round of news from the front.  He has managed to draw Kujuurou into an informal renga exchange, which almost certainly means something is wrong; Kujuurou hasn’t indulged him like this in over a year.  His soulmate’s poetry is not very good, but it is diverting to simply chase a thought between the two of them, stanza to stanza to stanza, and let the rest of the world fall away.

/ _The tattered lotus, yet overlooked by the war, grows at the crossroads_ /, he writes along the inside of his bared arm, lets the words stand for a few moments, then wipes them away with the ink-blotched cloth.  As he waits for a response, Toshitada’s nightly invocation curls into existence just above his elbow. 

/ _Naotoki._ /

Kujuurou begins to respond, gets as far as a spare-lined / _To the south,_ / before  _red_ washes over Jirougorou’s palms and shoots upward as if he’s plunged his arms into a pool of blood.  It buries Kujuurou’s half-formed reply and Toshitada’s inscription both. 

Seconds pass and his heartbeat goes on drumming in his ears until finally someone else—someone who didn’t drop their brush and immediately lose it to the cant of the roof—begins to write out Naotoki’s name again.  The syllabaries are larger this time, swift and unsteady—

—and smothered immediately by another smear of red. 

Naotoki writes nothing, responds to nothing, but for the rest of the evening, no one can write a word without it being subsumed in color. 

After that, Toshitada never writes Naotoki’s name again. 

 

* * *

 

Toshitada doesn’t write much of anything anymore.  His missives become quick, perfunctory things. 

/ _Today I saw my first battle.  I am looking forward to the next._ /

/ _Today I argued with Father.  He is a fool._ /

/ _I am leaving home.  In this age, I will do better alone._ /

Kujuurou tells himself it’s for the best and tries not to remember Naotoki’s penitent midnight scribblings. 

The night after he is finally assigned a unit of his own, he looks into a mirror, brush in hand, and contemplates writing something to Jirougorou.  It’s foolish.  Too romantic, too vulnerable.  Not when it could be read by the other two as well. 

Toshitada, for all his youth, may be right.  Perhaps they don’t live in an age for soulmates. 

 

* * *

 

The last words Toshitada writes to his soulmates, scribed as always down the inside of his arm, are these:

/ _I am gathering a force to take the capital.  If we were connected by fate, perhaps it was for this.  Will you join me?_ /

He waits for an answer for a long while, schooling himself to patience.  Who knows where they are now, in the chaos of the springtime war? 

Kujuurou writes back first, and he writes this: / _I will be no vassal of yours._ /

Jirougorou writes back soon after, and he writes this: / _What begins in a surge of violent motion is always reduced to the perfectly still._ /

Kujuurou, who has added nothing to his stony first reply, scribes out, / _Sun Tzu._    _When did you lose the ability to speak your own words?_ /

Toshitada picks up the brush to respond, but neither he nor Jirougorou has the time before Naotoki drowns them all in black, wide, maddened smears that narrow to needle-thin lines where his nails tear away from his own skin, trailing ink behind them. 

The ink brush snaps in Toshitada’s white-knuckled hand. 

He wraps his arm in silk, after, and puts it all out of his mind.

**Author's Note:**

> o Renga is a sort of haiku predecessor, often seen at celebratory gatherings during the period, in which a topic would be chosen and then two or more people would compose stanzas of poetry, each building on the last. It's comparable to the English writing/art form "Exquisite Corpse," which was also very nearly the fic title. 
> 
> o The inspiration for this particular iteration of soul-marks AU was taken from browsing [this post's](http://r-evolve-art.tumblr.com/tagged/soulmates) extensive list of variants on the theme. 
> 
> o This is, perhaps, not as comfort-fic-ish as I might have initially planned, but who knows where their connection may take them once they actually meet? I like to think that their childhood connection, along with _knowing_ they're connected by fate, rather than solely rivals for Talpa's recognition, will lead them back to each other in time. I hope you enjoyed the treat, in any case!


End file.
